The present invention generally relates to telecommunication systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to the segmented reservation of network resources for at least one call.
Known communication systems can reserve network resources for a call between a calling party and a called party. These known communication systems typically build a circuit for the call over a network having multiple switches based on circuit-switching. The circuit for the call is built in the sense that network resources are reserved at the intervening switches, and then the call is connected as the resources are reserved from switch to switch. Even in cases where the call is connected through multiple networks, such as an international call routed through two or more networks interconnected through gateway switches, a circuit for the call is built through the switches of the networks.
In the case of a packet-switched network, the resources for a given call can be reserved so that a particular quality of service for a call's data stream is guaranteed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,461,611, entitled “Quality of Service Management for Source Routing Multimedia Packet Networks”, discusses a reservation scheme where an allocator is attached to a local-area network (LAN) and reserves resources within the LAN to guarantee a particular quality of service of a given call. If that desired quality of service cannot be guaranteed, then the transmission request for the call is denied.
These known systems, however, fail to consider situations where multiple types of networks are connected. For example, these known systems fail to address ways to reserve network resources for a call over a combination of connection oriented networks and connection-less oriented networks. Generally speaking, the known systems are limited to a single network resource reservation arrangement regardless of the particular types of interconnected networks.